Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism. By Hannah Freed-Thall

Abstract

If Hannah Freed-Thall throws down the gauntlet early on in this study when she insists that ‘the aesthetic is nothing special’ (p. 14), she does so knowing that she has weighty backers in modern and contemporary French thought. Drawing, though never slavishly, on Bourdieu’s critique of the discourse of distinction, Barthes’s work towards the end of his career on ‘the neutral’, and Jacques Rancière’s on ‘the triumph of the quelconque’ (p. 15), Freed-Thall delivers a compelling study of three primary figures: Marcel Proust, Francis Ponge, and Nathalie Sarraute. The chosen authors of fiction and critical theorists alike address and subvert notions of high and low, refined and clichéd, ordinary and sophisticated. The effect of Freed-Thall’s engaging readings of the aesthetic and the ordinary is redistributive, to use Rancière’s terminology. Concretely in the case of Proust’s work, this means attending to the memorable moments in the Recherche when an intensely alive hero articulates grief in the cliché of ‘O sole mio’, and joy in monosyllables (the famous ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut’ of Combray). Freed-Thall thus shows Proust puzzling over, and dissenting from, ideas of prestige. To use her term, ‘distinction-spoiling’ moments abound both within and without the novel. In a powerful reading of Proust’s pastiches based on France’s fake-diamond scandal of 1908, the Lemoine Affair, Freed-Thall identifies a striking emblem of distinction in crisis. She demonstrates how ‘the collective investment of belief that allows the gross overvaluation of certain shiny rocks’ (p. 28) provides a social climate of the kind eagerly explored in the Recherche, where demystification is a much-used tool. Crucially, she draws on Proust’s work for Le Figaro and shows how the ephemeral and the contingent were encompassed within both the forum of the daily newspaper and the orbit of his novel. Moving on to the mid-twentieth century, Freed-Thall presents Ponge as a poet of the profane, in the sense set out by Giorgio Agamben, who writes of a ‘special kind of negligence’ that dispenses with aesthetic sublimation (quoted on p. 94). Ponge describes himself as contending with ‘la forêt épaisse des expressions maladroites’ (quoted on p. 99), and Freed-Thall convincingly draws the poet’s evaluation of the everyday into the structure of her book. Memorably, she loops back to Proust’s diamond-scandal pastiches when analysing Ponge’s poem ‘Le Verre d’eau’. There, the diamantine effect created by looking through a glass of water prompts the poet to observe: ‘Ô pureté tu n’es donc pas si rare’ (quoted on p. 111). If persuasive contexts underpin the assessments of Proust and Ponge, this also marks the handling of the work of Sarraute, which is presented as exemplifying Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Freed-Thall reads the omnipresent dramas of taste in Sarraute against the backdrop of André Malraux’s Maisons de la culture, where a cultural prescriptivism, working top-down, sought to bind together the nation. This and other contextualizations give renewed vibrancy and bite to Sarraute’s narratives. Through a series of rigorous analyses, then, this work shows how volatilities in the field of distinction and taste lie at the heart of French modernism.